Coverage of the Iraq War in the United States, Mainland China, Taiwan and Poland

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Walter Lippmann's description in Public Opinion of the news media as the bridge between “the world outside and the pictures in our heads” is particularly apt for the two goals of this study: exploring a new perspective in agenda-setting theory grounded in network analysis, which, in turn, provides the setting for a comparative analysis of the Iraq War news coverage in newspapers of the United States, Mainland China, Taiwan and Poland. Exploring competing hypotheses about the globalization of news versus the influence of cultural and political stances in the construction of attribute agendas during the opening two years of the Iraq War, this study found some support for both factors, but with the preponderance of the evidence reflecting the political stance of each newspaper's government. In regard to the emerging perspective of network agenda setting, this study found that a focus on bundles of message attributes highlights the larger context of these individual attributes on the media agenda and presents a more nuanced measure of salience in contrast to the traditional focus on the frequency of discrete objects or attributes to define the media agenda.